In this issue:

-Message from the President of SOS

-Reef Check

- Keepers of the Environment (RFK, Jr. Speech)

- New Board and Officers of Save Our Seas

- Membership Information

Message from the President

Aloha friends,

Mahalo to the many volunteers who helped make the Clean Oceans '97 Conference a great success. Without your hard work and dedication, we could not possibly have held the three day event. All workshops were full, reservations for films and slide shows were booked solid, and the dinner banquet featuring Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as keynote speaker was sold out. Thank you for your kokua. Video tapes of RFK, Jr.'s speech are available.

As Mr. Kennedy said so eloquently in his Saturday evening address to 450 dinner guests, "Environmentalism is about saving our communities. It is about the power of the community asserting itself on these environmental issues that will directly affect our future generations."

Here on Kauai, we have an opportunity to assert our right to clean and healthy oceans when the U.S. Navy holds public hearings this fall on its proposed missile range expansion into the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. These fragile and pristine islands are part of the National Wildlife Refuge and home to an array of endangered species. They are unique for their unspoiled beauty and abundant sealife.

Save Our Seas encourages everyone to participate in the hearings process, write to your representatives in the State Legislature and Congress, and demand that these islands and surrounding waters be designated a National Marine Sanctuary where military operations (and other injurious activities) are strictly off-limits.

As a community, it is our duty to keep the oceans clean for our future generations.

Teresa S. Tico

Mahalo, Teri Tico,

President Save Our Seas

The first Reef Check in the world was performed during the Clean Oceans Conference at the Princeville Hotel June 13-15. Participants from the conference and the community went into the ocean in front of the hotel and monitored the adjacent reef. Scientists in charge were Dr. Cindy Hunter and Dr. Alan Friedlander.

Reef Check 1997 is an exciting international event involving collaboration between recreational divers and marine scientists. 1997 is the International Year of the Reef (IYOR) and Reef Check is an official IYOR activity. The major goal of both IYOR and Reef Check is to raise public awareness about the value of coral reefs around the world and potential threats to their health. Reef Check surveys will be made between 14 June and 31 August 1997. They will involve one-day rapid surveys of as many reef sites as possible throughout the world using very basic "tried-and-true" techniques such as counting indicator species, e.g. grouper, sea urchins, measuring coral cover ratio live/dead etc. The work will be done in one day at each site by combined teams of recreational divers with a knowledge of marine biology and at least one professional marine scientist per team who will be responsible for ensuring the scientific quality of the work. Reef Check is 100% volunteer and more than 100 teams from 35 countries have pledged to take part.

Each Reef Check group will consist of a minimum of one qualified reef scientist who can recognize the organisms listed in the protocols, and a group of divers who can be trained to carry out most of the work. The methods have been designed to be as simple as possible so that high school students can participate. A practical group size would be 4 pairs of divers, however, larger or smaller groups could be accommodated. Divers should be sufficiently experienced that they are able to perform simple work underwater. It is up to the scientific leader to decide if the group members are adequately qualified to undertake the work. Group leaders should carefully check what the liability may be in their area, and may need to take precautions such as asking participants to sign liability waivers for this volunteer activity.

During the second week of September 1997, the Reef Check group will report on the basic "health" of a minimum of 100 reef sites from around the world, the first time such a synoptic view has been available. The goal will be to disseminate the information gained from this snapshot "Reef Check" by having a live video satellite link among a number of representative sites throughout the world. In this way, we hope to focus the attention of the public, politicians and government leaders on the status of the world's coral reefs.

The Global Headquarters of Reef Check is in the Institute for Environment and Sustainable Development at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Research Center. For more detailed information about Reef Check, please go to the website http://www.ust.hk/~webrc/reef.html.

Reef Check 1997 is an official International Year of the Reef activity designed by IYOR committee members and other experienced reef scientists. It has been enthusiastically supported by hundreds of scientists and divers around the world. The responsibility for Reef Check has been divided up among several National and Regional Coordination Centers. If you are located in the vicinity of a National or Regional Coordinators, please register with them.

The Second Annual Clean Oceans Conference was a great success. This year's Conference was dedicated to the preservation of coral reefs. The United Nations has declared 1997 "The International Year of the Reef."

Robert Kennedy, Jr. was the keynote speaker, with the Governor of Hawaii, Mr. Ben Cayetano, in attendance. The Mayor of Honolulu, Mr. Jeremy Harris, and Mayor Kusaka from Kauai also attended. They were joined by many coral reef experts who presented lectures and a coral reef monitoring workshop. This is the only conference in Hawaii focusing exclusively on coral reef protection and celebrating Oceans Day. We were very fortunate to have: Dr. Chuck Blay (Kauai¹s Coral/Algal Reefs), Mr. Don Heacock (A Watershed Stewardship Approach to Oceans in Peril), Dr. Alan Friedlander (Important Fisheries Studies about Hanalei Bay), Dr. Brian Tissot ("Community Based Management of Coral Reefs), Dr. Richard Grigg (The History of Coral Reefs in Hawaii), Dr. James Maragos (The Hawaii Coral Reef Initiative), Dr. Cindy Hunter (Video and Coral Reef Monitoring), Dr. John McManus (Status of World¹s Reefs), Marion Kelly and David Boynton (The Hawaiian Ahupua'a).

Unfortunately, coral reefs are dying world-wide, and up to 10% are already dead or damaged. Coral reefs are threatened by over-fishing, coastal development, sewage, silt, pesticides, fertilizers, and a variety of other human-caused problems including global warming and air pollution. At the current rate of destruction, up to 70 percent of the world's reefs may be killed by human activity within our lifetime. In Hawaii and the world, many of our reefs are already dead, dying, and endangered. Since 1993, Save Our Seas programs have focused on protection of coral reefs and other ocean resources.

President Clinton has wished Save Our Seas "...every success in your efforts to preserve, protect, and restore the world's oceans for the benefit of future generations." The goal for the conference is to create a bridge between scientists and the community, and to encourage everyone to work together as caretakers and stewards of the oceans.

President/Secretary - Teresa Tico

Vice President - Harold Spear III, MD

Treasurer - Rob Sanford

Executive Director - Carl Stepath

Ms.Teresa Tico, lawyer and windsurfer;

Mr. Steve Oberg CPA, surfer extraordinaire;

Harold Spear III, MD, physician and waterman;

Mr. Nick Baran, businessman and world sailor;

Ms. Linda Bail, dive master and marine expert;

Mr. Carl Stepath, businessman, sailor, and educator;

Brian Tissot Ph.D., Associate Professor, Marine Science UH-Hilo

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was the keynote speaker at the second annual Clean Oceans Conference and, as of this date, people are still talking about his speech. He applauded the Hawaiians for their sustainable living, but pointed out that we Americans are part of a culture based on a relationship with the environment. While the Europeans have castles, cathedrals, and beautiful museums; Americans have National Parks and breathtakingly beautiful landscapes. He pointed out that the environment is our heritage.

SOS member Mary Chase reports: For an hour and a quarter, RFK, Jr. mesmerized an audience of nearly 450, covering a vast amount of territory in the realm of protecting nature and our natural resources. Looking and talking like his late father, Bobby, Jr. exuded expertise, eloquence, and passion in a plea for all of us to take responsibility for our environment.

The source of Kennedy¹s expertise is his many years as an environmental attorney, professor of environmental law, and as a founder of an organization called Riverkeepers, which grew out of his long association with a community group founded to protect the Hudson River in New York State.

The mighty Hudson was one of the most polluted rivers in the Eastern U.S. until 20 years ago, when fisherman along the river and environmental activists joined forces to sue the companies who were dumping their wastes into the river.

Looking back at the founding of our nation, he sees the source of the United States¹ ³national character² as our relationship with the wilderness - with nature untamed and undiminished. He discussed the relationship to nature as the overarching theme in great American literature and how our greatest presidents were all naturalists. While the historical perspective gave me a renewed sense of our American heritage, it was Kennedy¹s spiritual vision that I found most profoundly moving. Video tapes of this speech are available for $19.95 at (808) 822-4642.

Speaking from his own deep religious faith, he reminded us that nature is our connection to God, that ³Nature is the way God communicates to us most forcefully,² and that ³if we destroy a single species, we have lost a connection to the divine.²

Living sustainably- not using up resources, and preserving for our children what we have no right to destroy-is a part of our covenant with God.

Our spiritual relationship with nature is the fundamental aspect of the Hawaiian culture, yet unfortunately this truth has not prevented us from doing grave damage here in our islands. Kennedy laid our responsibility before us here on Kaua¹i: ³We have a special mission here to protect and preserve God's creations: in fact, this is the reason God put us on this island.²

We also have the opportunity, indeed, the obligation, to create a model for the world of how we can live sustainably. As islanders, we should know better than anyone that ³there is no place to go²- that it is up to us to ³invent the models for how to do it right.² (Mary Chase, G.I., 6-18-97)